We have been out of office for so long that we…would pick up dog dirt with our hands and eat it if we thought we would get elected, Labour MP, 1995

So reflected the view of one Labour MP in 1995, during the first year of Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party. His departure this week from Downing Street and the Labour Party leadership brings to an end one of the most remarkable periods in British politics in the last century. It has given all of us an opportunity to reflect on his enormous achievements and failures, and it gave me an opportunity to look back on my doctoral dissertation—titled inelegantly (as all dissertations are) Regional Polarization in British Elections: The Effects of Thatcherism on the Party System, Labour Policies, and the Attitudes of Backbench MPs. Given that probably only 5 people on the entire planet have actually read the dissertation, completed in 1996, this also gives me the opportunity to share some of my earlier research with, hopefully, a few more people.

In the summer of 1993 I had been an intern to Barry Sheerman, a Labour MP in the House of Commons, an unbelievable experience that I will always cherish. (Mr. Sheerman is a top-notch human being who always took the time to integrate me into his busy schedule and spurred my passion to do the research.) The internship came at a momentous time for Labour, a period when its fortunes had appeared to have rebounded after reaching its nadir in the 1980s. Ahead in the opinion polls and with a confident leader in John Smith—and with the Tories having wrecked the public confidence in them after “Black Wednesday,” when John Major was forced to take Britain out of Europe’s exchange rate mechanism—Labour looked like it was ready for power after four successive electoral drubbings. Still, there were some political analysts who wondered if Smith, a Scot, had the image to win a sizeable enough bloc in “middle England” and if 1992 had been, indeed, “Labour’s Last Chance.”

In 1994-95 Blair sought to modernize the party, ditching the touchstone Clause IV, which had committed the party since 1918 to “the common ownership of the means of production, exchange and distribution.” It was symbolic politics more than anything, and it was meant to signal to voters that the party was reborn and ready for power—thus “New Labour,” as Blair dubbed it. (Though not really within the scope of this post, I had to share this quote on Clause IV reform by an MP during my research: “Someone said in a taxi to me that ‘if Clause IV was that important, why wasn’t it Clause I’ I think that sums up what a lot of people feel…I never had people on the doorstep say ‘well, I would vote for Labour except for this bit in your constitution.”).

Blair’s New Labour often evoked harsh reactions from Labour traditionalists, and for my dissertation I wanted to understand how popular the reforms were with Labour parliamentarians. So, I decided to send letters to every backbencher to see if they might meet with me and answer questions. Surprisingly, many agreed, and eventually for my research I had obtained interviews (all given anonymously) from some 20% of Labour backbenchers, a relatively good—if self-selected—sample. Overall, 80% could be considered supporters of New Labour, but a sizeable minority—one in five Labour MPs—was skeptical of Blair. One opponent of modernization, for example, summed up this anxiety, both on principle and style: “I view the changes with great suspicion and apprehension…I’ve known Tony for many, many years…but I think he is going too far and too quickly and this is being done without any degree of humility whatever.”

But among the most striking aspects of my interviews were how disciplined most of the Labour MPs were and how supportive they were of modernization. After then 16 years in the electoral wilderness, most wanted power and believed that Blair’s reforms (and Neil Kinnock’s before him) were exactly what would put the party over the top, a view reflected by one enthusiastic supporter of modernization: “We are starting to see the dividends in terms of electoral support…we have to win the next election not just because the Tories are unpopular but that people are thinking positively about Labour. Modernization provides us with this.” Most of the Labour MPs were not only supportive of Blair’s policies, but they believed that the party had to be united behind its leader, since any factional fight could give the Conservative Party an opening and make voters uneasy. As one MP put it, specifically on Clause IV but reflective of the more general view, probably of many MPs on votes in the House of Commons since 1997 on reform measures that were contrary to the principles that many had grown up with politically: “If the leader jumps off the cliff, you have no alternative but to catch him. You just don’t discredit your leader if he puts himself on the line.”

Surprisingly, notwithstanding the backstabbing and factional squabbling between the Brownites and the Blairites over these many years, Gordon Brown is the biggest beneficiary of Blair’s reforms and the attitudinal shift in MPs. He inherits a party that believes unity is essential to govern and win. Labour MPs learned the lesson of their party’s internecine conflicts of the 1980s and the Conservative Party’s split in the 1990s over Europe that dragged John Major down at every turn.

Gordon Brown’s coronation as Labour leader and prime minister comes against no opposition from with Labour. Yes, there is a sizeable band of MPs who oppose Brown’s leadership and who might become more vocal should he slip, but they couldn’t even get enough signatures to run a candidate against him. And, polls on the eve of his confirmation in office for the first time give the party hope for the first time in a while that it might just win the next election. Thus, in the run-up to the next election, likely in 2009 or 2010, Brown will likely have his party united behind him, something that he must thank Tony Blair for. The question come election time will be, however, whether Brown, the dour Scot (a Google search yields more than 37,000 results for “Gordon Brown” + dour), will be able to relate to middle England the same way Blair has been. Most observers, myself included, have their doubts.